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Class. 



Book 






/ 



War Addresses 
1917 



J. J. Jusserand 

Theodore Roosevelt 

Henry Cabot Lodge 

James W. Gerard 

Brig. Gen. William A. White, C. M. G. 

Stephane Lauzanne 

Henry Franklin-Bouillon 

James M. Beck 



New York 

The Pennsylvania Society 

1918 






ANNUAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE SOCIETY 

The Year Book of the Society is a record of its annual work and 
a summary of contemporary patriotic and historical activity in Penn- 
sylvania. 



Year 


Book, 


1901. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


68. 


Illustrations, 


18 


Year 


Book, 


1902. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


143. 


Illustrations, 


72 


Year 


Book, 


1903. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


208. 


Illustrations, 


150 


Year 


Book, 


1904. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


352. 


Illustrations, 


175 


Year 


Book, 


1905. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


208. 


Illustrations, 


88 


Year 


Book, 


1906. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


223. 


Illustrations, 


113 


Year 


Book, 


1907. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


264. 


Illustrations, 


101 


Year 


Book, 


1908. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


248. 


Illustrations, 


112 


Year 


Book, 


1909. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


246. 


Illustrations, 


103 


Year 


Book, 


1910. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


240. 


Illustrations, 


88 


Year 


Book, 


1911. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


232. 


Illustrations, 


126 


Year 


Book, 


1912. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


192. 


Illustrations, 


83 


Year 


Book, 


1913. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


228. 


Illustrations, 


98 


Year 


Book, 


1914. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


256. 


Illustrations, 


76 


Year 


Book, 


1915. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


272. 


Illustrations, 


92 


Year 


Book, 


1916. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


256. 


Illustrations, 


74 


Year 


Book, 


1917. 


Cloth. 


Pages, 


280. 


Illustrations, 


104 



Other Publications 

Report on the William Penn Memorial, 1911. Boards. 
Constitution of the United States. With facsimile letter 

from President Taft. 1912. Boards. 
The United States and the War. 1916. Cloth. 
War Addresses : 1917. 






CONTENTS 

Editorial Note 4 

Addresses at the Dinner for the French Ambassador, Decem- 
ber 8 5 

1. Presidential Address — Honourable James M. Beck... 5 

2. France — His Excellency, Mr. J. J. Jusserand 10 

3. The United States — Honourable Theodore Roosevelt. . 19 

4. The Old and the New Entente — Honourable Henry 

Cabot Lodge 28 

5. The American Diplomat — Honourable James W. 

Gerard 33 

6. A Message from the British Ambassador — Brig. Gen. 

William A. White, C. M. G 40 

Address by Stephane Lauzanne 41 

Addresses at the Luncheon for M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon. . 44 

1. Introductory — Honourable James M. Beck 44 

2. Address by M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon 48 



EDITORIAL NOTE 

The addresses delivered at the meetings of The Pennsylvania 
Society in 1917, by a brilliant group of world-leaders and thinkers, 
constitute a valuable contribution to the war literature of 1917. It 
has seemed worth while, therefore, to issue them apart from the 
Year Book, for which they have been prepared, that they may have 
a wider circulation than may be possible in the larger publication. 
Concerned, as they are, with vital topics of the present day, they 
appear in every way worthy of the largest possible distribution. 

Barr Ferree. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 



ADDRESS OF THE HONOURABLE JAMES M. BECK 
President of the Society 

Your Excellency and Gentlemen of France: 

The Pennsylvania Society is greatly honoured in having you 
as its guests tonight and extends to you a heartfelt welcome. You 
need no other passport to our hospitality than that you come from 
France. 

We greet you tonight as fellow-citizens. This is no unmeaning 
phrase. While our soldiers fight side by side in the trenches, while 
our women behind the lines give to the great cause the very treas- 
ures of their souls, while our statesmen meet in joint council and 
combine the common resources to a common end, while our flags 
are intertwined in the comradeship of battle, there is, to the eye of 
imagination, a new state called into being which we may call the 
United Free States of the world, and of that State we are fellow 
citizens. Your Minister of War Painleve recently gave fitting ex- 
pression to this ideal, when he urged that "a single front, a single 
army, a single nation, that is the programme for future victory," 
and to this the great Prime Minister of England fittingly replied: 
"if after forty months of war, after all the lessons the war has 
taught us, the Allies are not capable of that sacred international 
union, then in spite of their sacrifices they would not be worthy of 
victory." 

That sacred union, so finely characterized by our President 
as a "partnership of the democratic nations," will continue and all 
the powers of Prussianism and Hell will not prevail against it. 

Our soldiers who fight side by side in the trenches can claim a 
more sacred relation, for it is true of them as they stand guard to- 
night on the far-flung battle line, as Shakespeare made his Henry 
V say to his soldiers on the eve of Agincourt — 

"We band of brothers 
For he who sheds his blood this day with me 
He is my brother." 



6 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

The Pennsylvania Society meets each year to pay a tribute 
of affection to the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Tonight, 
however, our theme is France ; but in making this notable departure 
from a policy of many years, we need not forget the Common- 
wealth, to whose honour this Society is dedicated, for France has 
written notable chapters of her epic history upon the soil of Penn- 
sylvania. It was in Philadelphia that Lafayette tendered his sword 
to Washington ; it was at Brandywine that he gave his blood for 
our cause; it was from Philadelphia that the greatest son of Penn- 
sylvania, Benjamin Franklin, went to France to seek aid for the 
infant republic, and it was there that he received a welcome such as 
France never gave before or since to any man from a foreign coun- 
try. The glory of Valley Forge is that of France as well as of 
America, and when the long, dreary and terrible winter had ended, 
it was in this sacred place, in the Valley of the Schuylkill, that news 
came to Washington that France had staked her very existence as 
a nation upon the success of the American arms ; and it was then 
that Washington, with his own hand, wrote the order that the little 
army should be assembled, and that to the rolling of the drums, 
and the jubilant roar of the cannon every American soldier should 
give three cheers — one for "France," one for "the friendly European 
powers," and one for "the American States." That cheer, which 
awoke the echoes in the Valley of the Schuylkill nearly 140 years 
ago, we take up tonight; and again from our heart of hearts, we, 
descendants of the Pennsylvania line, cheer for "France," for "the 
friendly European powers" (now most happily including Great Brit- 
ain), and for "the American States." 

We are met tonight especially to honour the Ambassador of 
France, who greatly honours us with his presence. For many 
years he has represented his noble country in the capital of our 
nation, and at all times he has enjoyed the respect and confidence 
of each successive President of the United States. We honour him 
not merely as an accomplished and noble-minded diplomat, but also 
as an author of distinction, who has promoted the great cause of 
Franco-American fraternity, by interpreting the literature of the 
English-speaking races to France, and the literature of France to 
England and America. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 7 

I shall not at this time attempt to say all that is in my heart 
with reference to His Excellency's contribution to the welfare of 
civilization, a contribution never more conspicuously useful than in 
the last three years, when in a very critical time and under cir- 
cumstances of extraordinary delicacy and embarrassment, he has 
served not only his own country, but also the nation to which he 
was accredited. To speak of him as he deserves is the office of a 
friend, and while I am greatly privileged to feel that I am his friend, 
yet I shall not say all that is in my heart to say as to our guest 
of honour, for there are two here tonight, who are older friends, 
and who may more justly claim this office of friendship — one a 
leading Member of the Senate, and the other an Ex-President of 
the United States, who will pay deserved tributes to all that the 
Ambassador has done in making the path smooth for the new En- 
tente, new and yet gloriously old. 

In the limited time that I shall reserve to myself, less I trespass 
unduly upon those who are also our guests tonight, I wish to speak 
of France. 

I shall not attempt to praise her, for the person that we love 
we do not attempt to praise merely in words. We love France and 
her glory is beyond verbal appraisement, and never in all her long 
and resplendent career as a nation was her prestige more resplen- 
dent than at this hour. 

We hail her tonight as a victor, and notwithstanding the critical 
nature of the hour, a victor she is. Every war has two aspects — 
a spiritual and a material one — of these, the former, measured by 
the eternal verities of the ages, is the more important. From this 
higher and more enduring standpoint, the result of this war is no 
longer in doubt. France, and indeed the Allied nations are the un- 
doubted victors, not only because the irreversible judgment of man- 
kind has sustained the righteousness of their quarrel, but because 
they have shown an infinite moral superiority to their cruel and 
unscrupulous enemies. France has conquered herself, and "he that 
conquers himself is greater than he who takes a city." She has 
conquered Germany, for even if German arms should triumph — 
which God forbid! — France would stand in the estimation of the 
ages as an infinite superior to her adversary, as Athens was greater 



8 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

than Rome, even when Athens .was in a material sense conquered. 
The art, the culture, the idealism of Greece rose even in defeat 
above the martial might of Rome. For all that is the finest in life 
men turned and still turn to the "City of the violet crown," rather 
than to Imperial Rome, and the new city of the violet crown on the 
banks of the Seine dims with its glory the vulgar splendour of 
Berlin 

One can measure this triumph by a striking contrast. Tonight 
every nation in the world respects France, and every nation, with 
the exception of Germany, loves France, while tonight there is not 
a nation in the world that loves Germany; and only her vassal 
allies can be said to even respect her, in the sense that the slave 
respects the lash of the slave-driver. The bouleversement in this 
respect in the last half century is remarkable. In 1871, France was 
abased in the eyes of the world, and Germany stood forth as the 
conqueror in shining armour. Tonight the world salutes France as 
a nation of Bayards — sans peur et sans reproche — and loathes Ger- 
many as a convicted criminal at the bar of civilization. All the roar 
of Hindenburg's cannons cannot silence the rising storm of execra- 
tion against this criminal nation, nor can it lessen the glory with 
which civilization invests the France of today. 

But it is not enough that France should have only spiritual 
triumph. Her faith, which has literally removed mountains, must 
not be in vain or lack fitting recompense. She has given the lives 
of over a million of her sons for the cause of civilization, and her 
material triumph is a sacred debt due alike to her dead and to her 
unborn. Her martyrdom in the cause of civilization has lasted 
longer than the three years of this tragic war. For nearly half a 
century she has suffered the agony of an undeserved humiliation, 
during which she made inestimable sacrifices to interpose herself as 
a barrier between the arrogant ambitions of Germany and the rest 
of the world. The statue of her Strassburg is still draped with 
mourning emblems, and they must and shall be removed. For three 
years she has "fought the good fight and has kept the faith," and 
while she has never in words appealed to us, yet she now has a just 
claim, that America should come to her relief and share to a larger 
degree her sacrifices. We, of all nations, cannot afford to resist 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 9 

the appeal that comes to us, not only from the living Frenchmen 
but from the graves of her dead. Let us not forget that early in 
1781, when the hour was dark for us and the situation most critical, 
Washington sent this message to France : 

"If France delays a timely and powerful aid in the critical 
position of affairs, it will avail us nothing should she attempt it 
hereafter — it may be declared in a word that we are at the end of 
our tether, and that now or never deliverance must come." 

France could make to us the same appeal. Never did a nation 
make greater sacrifices and ask less for them. Never did a nation 
fight so valorously and boast less about it. Whatever comes, she 
will fight bravely on until final victory, for in this dark and terrible 
night she is a star — 

"To whose fixed and constant quality 
There is no fellow in the firmament." 

I may assure his Excellency, and our other guests from France, 
that America appreciates this ; but appreciation of the fact is not 
enough. It must not only be translated into action, but into very 
speedy and effective action. The primal necessity is one of ship- 
ping. France needs our men and our guns less than she needs our 
ships and our food, for her position in this critical hour of a titanic 
war is that of the valorous Ajax, who, when enveloped in unnatural 
clouds and darkness in the war before the walls of Troy, prayed : 

"Dispel this cloud, the light of heaven restore, 
Give me to see and Ajax asks no more." 

In aiding France, the feet of America should be swift, and its 
soul jubilant. Let us say to France — "O sister Republic — for we 
were born of the same mighty travail — we are coming millions 
strong to your relief, and we will spare neither our lives, nor our 
treasures until your brave children have avenged the humiliation 
of 1871 by marching as victor down the Unter den Linden to the 
inspiring strain of the Marseillaise. 



10 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 



FRANCE 

Address of His Excellency, Mr. J. J. Jusserand, Ambassador of the 

French Republic 

I 

A great country should have a great representative. France 
has only here a devoted one, who, since early youth, has tried to 
serve her and who, accredited to the United States for now fifteen 
years, has ever had present before his eyes the good example of his 
diplomatic ancestors Gerard de Rayneval and La Luzerne: they 
showed how French diplomats should act towards a country whose 
leader in their days was George Washington, and how the two 
tasks of serving France and America are, in reality, as closely con- 
nected as brother to brother; devoted to them is what I hope I 
have been. 

I did not have to choose what my life should be ; events left 
me no choice; the war of 1870 decided. I was of those who, too 
young to take part in it, had been left at school, while all the older 
boys had enlisted: and it was a great day when the survivors re- 
turned from Belfort, the citadel which had remained unconquered, 
and showed us with pride how they had managed, to the last, to 
preserve a gala uniform, which feat consisted in buttoning their 
mud-stained coat to the left on ordinary days and to the right on 
great days. 

A constant flow of troops moving north occupied half the col- 
lege, and while the news came gloomier every day, our parents and 
our professors taught us that a much more important and useful 
duty than hating the enemy, consisted in hating our own faults and 
weaknesses. Our vain confidence in our lucky stars, our inade- 
quate knowledge of foreign nations and of what was hatching in the 
wide world, had been our bane. Work, learn, become complete 
men, was the ever recurring burden of our tuition. Never think 
of duty and pleasure; let duty be your pleasure, and you will soon 
find that there is no greater one. 

It is not possible to imagine sadder but more resolute little peo- 
ple than we were, learning four or five modern languages besides 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 11 

Greek and Latin, law, mathematics, fine arts. Physical exercise 
was not forgotten, and we were riding, fencing, swimming, climbing, 
unaware that this: would be some day of use to one of the group, 
in order to climb the rocks along the Potomac and swim the river 
in the company of the President of the United States. There was 
no merit in all this, the ball had been set rolling by our parents and 
teachers, and it was rolling. 

II 

At the time of the War of Independence, your own Tom Paine, 
own own Tom Paine, for he was a member of our Convention, and 
our British friends' Tom Paine, too, for he was born a Britisher, 
thus belonging to the three Yorktown nations, said a word that 
fits as well the present crisis as the one he took part in : "These are 
the times that try men's souls." Yours have been tried and found 
true, so have ours, we hope. 

I have seen nothing of this war, and yet I saw what was per- 
haps most characteristic and telling : I crossed part of France during 
the mobilization. In the midst of harvest time, knowing nothing of 
the imperial plots and threatening onslaught, our men had been 
busy reaping their fields on those glorious summer days ; and as 
unexpectedly as a thunderbolt from the blue, they had been called 
to the colours for the greatest trial their nation, in the course of her 
millenial history, had ever experienced. Without a shout, without 
a threat, without a word, with serious, not anxious faces, they had 
left their quiet homes and answered the call of duty ; and we passed 
them, following the roads, with determined faces, in dogged silence, 
leading to camp the grey mare and their other four-footed friends. 
Fit men to fight at the Marne, Ypres and Verdun; their souls had 
been tried and found true. 

We thought we knew the kind of enemy we would have to 
fight; we had met him before on the battlefield, and had visited 
his country and much too often welcomed him to our homes. We 
had in truth no idea of what he was. The first revelations were 
indeed so surprising that we could scarcely take them seriously and 
were tempted to attribute them to some passing fit of madness. 
When we were told that war was declared on us because we had 
bombarded Nuremberg, we were as much tempted to laugh as to be 



12 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

indignant. By degrees only, by the ever recurring repetition of the 
same words and the same deeds, we understood what the reality was 
and that we had to do with an enemy who wanted to dominate, not 
our country but the world, relying equally for success on two means, 
brute force and secret intrigue: the classical attributes of tyrants 
in every age. 

To what extent they rely on those means would be unbeliev- 
able, but the facts are there. They take pride in the false assump- 
tion that they are the modern Huns. The Huns would not be 
flattered, for they knew something else than force and perfidy, and 
were sometimes accessible to sentiment. At the prayer of its Bishop 
St. Loup, they spared Troyes. No, to meet their equals we must go 
back to primeval times when crude mankind worshipped force and 
nothing else, worshipped tempests, fire and earthquakes, found in 
the violence of elemental forces something divine. The basis of 
such a cult has nothing very exalted, it is fear. That is the basis 
of the cult they render today to what has been justly called their own 
private Hohenzollern God. 

The life formula of primeval men was a brief one of three 
words: "Might is right"; they knew no better, they had it in com- 
mon with the mastodon and the dinosaur. 

Is it believable that after the lapse of so many decades of 
centuries, the same formula can have been propagated as an axiom, 
an ideal of life, as another name for a thing which our enemies 
are pleased to call Kultur ? Certainly not ; yet it is so. 

You can open almost at random any of the books in which they 
speak their mind and you will find that same veneration, coupled 
with fear, for sheer force. Here is an example. One of their 
princely Highnesses, Adolf Friedrich, duke of Mecklenburg, ex- 
plored Africa in 1910-11, at the head of a German botanical and 
zoological mission, crossed our colonies and went (and this is the 
title of his book) "from the Congo to the Niger and the Nile"; a 
thoroughly Germanic expedition, "His Majesty the Emperor hav- 
ing been graciously pleased to contribute a substantial sum of money 
towards the expenses." 

What strikes one most in the account of the stay of those 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 13 

Germans in our possessions is that our humanity towards the na- 
tives inspires them with nothing but derision. Herr Doctor Schu- 
botz, one of the contributors, drops in a casual way, as a matter 
of course, those memorable and characteristic sayings : "Might is 
right must be the motto of every intending colonist; a hundred 
times have I learned this by bitter experience, for friendly persua- 
sion will never induce a Sara native to carry a tin box for you. He 
will do so only if he knows that his refusal will result in his hut 
being burnt down by soldiers. Unfortunately there were not enough 
available soldiers." 

It is exactly the same principle which another German prince, 
the very one who had been graciously pleased to contribute to the 
expedition, and who thought he had enough soldiers, applied on 
August 4, 1914, to the Belgians, treated, as the rest of the world, 
as if they were natives of Sara. 

But he was mistaken, he had not enough soldiers ; on a part of 
Belgium, the Belgian flag still floats, held in the grasp of a model 
ruler; a sign that for the primeval being of kultur, the day of doom 
is coming. 

What scorn would not Schubotz and his peers have felt for the 
man who having to deal with American savages once wrote : "The 
basis of our proceedings with the Indian natives, has been and will 
be justice." That man was George Washington. 

If you want to see at a glance the difference between kultur and 
civilization, compare the effusions of Herr Schubotz and the ac- 
count of his journey, in similar regions, of another huntsman and 
zoological collector, one of the successors of Washington, former 
President Roosevelt. 

That in the Germans' eyes force and justice are the same 
thing has been superabundantly proved at Louvain, Reims and each 
of the unfortunate cities or villages occupied by the enemy. Re- 
proached by the parish priest of one of them with monstrous, in- 
excusable, perfectly useless cruelties, a German officer answered: 
"Oh! we were so very victorious" — a lesson for the world as to 
what would happen if the Germans were to be in the end "so very 
victorious"; which they won't be. That officer had something of 



14 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

the dinosaur. So do, judged from their words, many of the Ger- 
man spokesmen, Major General von Disfurth, for example, who 
wrote in November, 1914: "For my part, I hope that in this war we 
have merited the title of barbarians" (Yes, General; be of good 
cheer; you have); or Adolf Lasson, professor of philosophy at 
Berlin, and in whose philosophy are found such unsophisticated 
gems as these: ''Our army is the epitome of German excellence. 
We must sacrifice our dearest, our best, our most noble, to fight with 
Russian beasts . . . Russia must no longer be on our fron- 
tier. . . . Holland is a mere appendage to Germany." Which 
all comes to this: what is good to have, we have a right to take, 
since we possess the force to take it : a philosophy which, if they 
had any university at all, the dinosaurs must have taught to their 
young. 

Ill 

Concealed, insidious action is the other mainstay of the system, 
coupled with a quiet assumption and repetition that untruth is truth, 
as persistent as the saying that might is right, and an exact parallel 
to it. 

It seems to be part of the Germanic creed that for meaner 
creatures, that is those not so big as the dinosaur, it is enough to 
repeat that two and two make five, two and two make five — for 
the thing to become axiomatic and therefore indisputable. And 
we hear them repeating in the quiet tones of a professor of algebra : 
two and two make five. A variant is sometimes introduced and we 
hear that two and two make three: that is when the interests of 
the minor creatures themselves are in question; it scarcely ever 
happens in their calculations that they simply make four. 

♦When one of them ventures to say that it is so, he is never 
pardoned, and he becomes the object of ceaseless obloquy, as for hav- 
ing betrayed a secret. A striking example is that of Chancellor von 
Bethmann-Hollweg, to whom it happened, in the flush of the early days 
of the war, to say of the monstrous invasion of Belgium by his people: 
"We do wrong." At a recent meeting of the Agrarian League in Berlin 
(February, 1918) Herr von Oldenburg, said to be a personal friend of 
the Crown Prince, spoke thus : "I do not believe any mistake did such 
grave and lasting injury as Bethmann-Hollweg has done his sovereign 
and his fatherland . . . His declaration about the wrong we did in 
Belgium cannot ever be washed away by any rain." No amount of rain 
could, of course, wash the stain of his having revealed that secret of 
secrets, that wrong is wrong and that two and two make four. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 15 

Proofs are superabundant. After the invasion of Belgium and 
the horrors that followed, the same Lasson wrote: "We Germans 
have no friends because we are . . . morally superior to all." 
After the same invasion and the declaration of war on us, because 
we had bombarded Nuremberg, the Kaiser exclaimed : "The sword 
has been forced into our hands," and he has never tired of repeating 
this, in the belief that it would become axiomatic for his hearers that 
two and two make five. 

It has not become so in any case, for the President of the 
United States, who was saying the other day, in his memorable 
speech at Buffalo : "The war was started by Germany. Her author- 
ities deny that they started it. But I am willing to let the statement 
I have just made await the verdict of history." 

Speaking of the invasion of Belgium, I may quote a personal 
souvenir. I was, in the early days of the war, at Havre, trying to 
return here. I desired, before sailing, to get maps. I could not 
find in all the city one of our frontier bordering on Germany; the 
answer was the same in every shop : officers have bought them all. 
But there were plenty of supposedly useless maps of the Belgian 
frontier ; so I bought one and, contrary to expectation, could follow 
the events on it for a long time. 

I never was more tempted to publish an answer than when Dr. 
Dernburg made public, once for all, the reasons why Germany had 
dominant rights over Belgium. The statement is of importance 
because we have it, in one and the same sentence, from a man of 
standing and education, considered a moderate in his country, that 
for Germans two and two make five, and for the Belgians three. 
Here are the words of the Doctor in an article by him, published 
in the Independent, December 7, 1914: 

"Geographically, Belgium does certainly belong to the German 
Empire. She commands the mouth of the biggest German stream." 

My answer would have been: One should yield to good rea- 
sons, even when given by an enemy. As soon, and so long, as Bel- 
gium commands the mouth of the chief German stream, she should 
be handed to the German executioner, but not before. For the 



16 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

present, however, if we trust school books, Belgium does not com- 
mand the mouth of the Rhine, which flows to the sea across Hol- 
land; nor of the Meuse, nor even of the Scheldt; she commands, 
in fact, the mouth of no river at all. 

This example of serene false assertion is a typical one, rein- 
forced even by what follows in Dr. Dernburg's article from which 
we learn that "Antwerp is most essentially a German port . . . 
That Antwerp should not belong to Germany is as much an anomaly 
. . . as if New York had remained English after the war of 
Independence." 

Of any Germanic War of Independence, liberating Antwerp 
as New York had been liberated by you, the Doctor, for reasons 
of his own, says nothing. Only those can wonder who fancy that 
two and two make four. 

IV 

How can this system of force-worship and false pretences 
be accepted by any nation? It has been accepted by one only, the 
Prussian, but through it, by degrees, since the war of 1870, by the 
rest of Germany. The means has been militarism. 

Militarism does not consist, as some continue to repeat now 
and then, in having many soldiers. We have as many soldiers as 
we have inhabitants able to bear arms, and we are not militaristic. 
One proof among many others : we never at any period of our 
national life, celebrated the anniversary of any of our victories. 
The same with you. 

Militarism consists in the whole nation, male and female, young 
and old, soldiers and civilian, laymen and priests, blindly accept- 
ing to be ruled over in military fashion: all obeying whatever the 
order ; all believing the word received from the people above them, 
whatever be that word. Magister dixit. The whole forces of the 
nation are thus placed in the hands of a single man, responsible to 
nobody, who may use them at his pleasure, the whole machinery 
thus possessing an extraordinary destructive force; and all the in- 
dividuals composing it having to act, speak and believe as they are 
told. They were told of Nuremberg, of the sword having been 
forced into the hands of their sovereign ; of Belgian maidens goug- 
ing out the eyes of kindly German soldiers; of the mouth of the 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 17 

Rhine being wantonly commanded by impudent Belgium. All that 
was accepted as a matter of course; of this is made the German 
"morale." The imperial authorities take pride in allowing British 
papers to be read in Berlin cafes ; they can do so without fear. 
The contents are not believed; the readers find in those sheets 
that two and two make four ; they know very well that it is not so. 

V 

When I returned here in August, 1914, I had to make up my 
mind as to what line of conduct I should follow. The enemy was 
filling the air with high-sounding statements, spending millions, 
engineering the most astounding propaganda, the aims of which 
were not all of them persuasion, as was shown in the Welland Canal 
affair and similar ones. 

I was not long in deciding: I would leave the whole field 
to the adversary ; would take no part in the fray, let him have 
all the spotlight, save the French millions (I never spent so 
much as one cent), and so that he be better heard, never myself 
say a word. This was considered by some very bold; some blamed 
me ; I would not change, and without swerving one way or the 
other, persisted. 

What made me so bold was my unshakable faith in our good 
cause and in American good sense ; I might add in American sen- 
timent. 

Practical efficiency, and soul-moving sentiment are the two 
poles of the American character. They never showed to better 
advantage than in this crisis. No Kaiser could lead Americans 
astray by false calculations, or false geography, nor efface by any 
insinuations the sentiment they had for France. 

Eleven years ago, in the city of Independence, Philadelphia, 
a grand gathering took place, to commemorate the bi-centennial of 
Franklin's birth. Presenting to the Ambassador of France the 
gold medal struck on that occasion, in accordance with a vote of 
Congress, the then Secretary of State, Elihu Root, delivered a brief 
address of extraordinary beauty, in the course of which he said : 

"Take this medal for your country as a token that, with all the 
changing manners of the passing years . . . Americans have 



18 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

not forgotten their fathers nor their fathers' friends. Know by it 
that we have in America a sentiment for France, and a sentiment 
enduring among a people, is a great and substantial fact to be 
reckoned with." 

I had faith in the truth of those words; I knew they would 
prove prophetic, and they have. The great heart of America had 
early spoken ; young men from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn- 
sylvania, Chicago and all the great universities had gone as leaders, 
as precursors, to France, helping her wounded, fighting for her 
cause, enlisting in the Legion, or becoming, as Mr. Roosevelt has 
felicitously called them, the Lafayettes of the air. The American 
mind had been enlightened by the pen and the word of the best in 
this land, some of the chief ones are among the orators of tonight. 

Then the day that had to come, arrived, when the chief magis- 
trate of this Republic raised his voice and said: "We have no 
selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquests and no dominion. 
We seek no indemnities for ourselves, and no material compensa- 
tion for the sacrifices we shall freely make." Almost the very 
words the French had used in 1778. And President Wilson con- 
tinued: "Civilization itself seems to be in the balance, but right 
is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which 
we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy . . . 
for the rights and liberties of small nations, for the universal domin- 
ion of right by such a concert of free peoples as will bring peace 
and safety to all nations and make the world at last free." 

Memorable words, of far-reaching and lasting consequences. 

You are a nation that remembers. So are we. The date 
1778 is still, as the event shows, engraved in your hearts. I can 
assure you, Mr. President, you whose "Evidence in the Case" has 
forecast the decision of posterity, and you all, American friends, 
that so long as we live, so long as there is a France, all the inhabi- 
tants of her soil will keep engraved in their hearts the date 1917, 
when America decided to come in and to help win the day for 
Liberty. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 19 



THE UNITED STATES 

Address of the Honourable Theodore Roosevelt 

For the last three years and a quarter I have had but little to 
do, when I preached Americanism, save to say "ditto to Mr. Burke" 
in the person of James M. Beck. It has been my supreme good for- 
tune to stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the fight for the 
right as it was given us to see the right ; and naturally it is a matter 
of very great pleasure to me to be one of those chosen to greet the 
Ambassador this evening. I doubt very much whether any Ambas- 
sador ever had closer relations with the head of the country to which 
he was accredited than was the case with Ambassador Jusserand 
and myself ; and I am very sure they were closer than those of Mr. 
Gerard with the representatives of the Hohenzollerns ! 

And as the Ambassador has alluded to the diversions in which 
we took part, of a hygenic nature, I may, perhaps, be permitted to 
say that we did occasionally take walks together. Indeed, it was 
my great pleasure on one occasion to have the then Judge and 
afterwards Ambassador Gerard with me on one of those walks. 
The Ambassador has alluded to the fact that occasionally in the 
course of the walks we swam. I remember once — I would not 
venture to repeat this if the Ambassador had not laid himself open 
to it — I remember once when we were out walking that we came 
to the Potomac and swam it. We had undressed, and just as we 
were getting in somebody said to the Ambassador, "Mr. Ambassa- 
dor, Mr. Ambassador, you have your gloves on," to which the Am- 
bassador responded, "Yes ; we might meet ladies !" 

If this were a less formal gathering, I could relate other anec- 
dotes to show that the Ambassador is not only one of the ablest 
of diplomats, and a great literary man, but also a dead game sport ! 
I am sorry to say that your President now actually wants me to 
enter into a controversy as to which of us won at tennis. I posi- 
tively decline to mar the happiness of this occasion by any discus- 
sion of the kind. 



20 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

Friends, the Ambassador has been here for fifteen years, and 
he has fulfilled as very, very few Ambassadors have ever done, the 
two prime functions of an Ambassador — showing genuine devotion 
to his own country, and showing genuine purpose to do all that 
can be done for the country to which he is accredited. The Ambas- 
sador has proved himself as able a servant of France as France 
has ever had in her long line of able servants. And he has also 
proved himself as loyal a friend of America as even France has 
produced since 1778. 

We greet the Ambassador and through him we pay homage 
to France. Thank heaven, at last we stand shoulder to shoulder 
with France, as one hundred and forty years ago, in our hour of 
dark trial, the forefathers of the French of today stood shoulder 
to shoulder with our forefathers here. As you have said, Mr. 
Ambassador, before we went to war with Germany we had sent 
our non-neutral Lafayettes of the air to battle with the German 
war-hawks over the French trenches, and now our troops have 
crossed and are crossing the seas by the hundred thousand to play 
against the brutal soldiery of the Hohenzollerns the part that 
Rochambeau once played against a valiant and chivalrous foe. 

I wish that all our people would read the book in which Ambas- 
sador Gerard has given his experiences with the German people: 
"The German Kaiser and the German People." The book teaches 
us a needed lesson about our bitter and treacherous foes. It is not 
too much to say that not for over fifty years has any Ambassador 
of ours had a more difficult part to play and played it better than 
Ambassador Gerard did. 

Friends, we welcome our guest for the man that he is, and 
for the mighty nation that he so worthily represents. But re- 
member that our welcome is worthless except in so far as it is an 
earnest of the tangible aid that with the utmost speed we are to 
give the French people. 

The justification, and the only justification for this banquet, 
is in that service flag which hangs overhead. No Society that can- 
not produce that kind of a flag to show what its members and the 
sons of its members have done, has any right to hold a banquet at 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 21 

this time. Words are good only and precisely as they are trans- 
lated into deeds. The words of Franklin have been quoted tonight. 
Why? Because they were made good by the ragged soldiers who 
saw through the dark days of the Revolutionary War. It was the 
men of Valley Forge, the men of Trenton, the men of Yorktown, 
who have given us a right to speak of the fathers of this Republic. 
The written word and the spoken word count only when they rep- 
resent the deeds of the men with sword girt on thigh. 

We are in this war in desperate earnest, and we are in honour 
bound to strain every effort on behalf of this nation, and on behalf 
of France, and on behalf of England and our other Allies. 

We meet here tonight; we meet here in luxury; we meet at 
this Dinner in peace, after we have been ten months at war. Why? 
Because the French and the English armies and navies have pro- 
tected us with their armed might. They have protected us for 
more than those ten months; for forty months they have been 
fighting our battles. We walk with our heads up tonight, instead 
of cowering before a brutal alien soldiery, only because by the 
hundred thousand the men of France and the men of England have 
died, that our souls should be free. 

This is not a debt that can be paid by even the nicest words. 
No clapping, no cheering is of any real consequence in paying such 
a debt. The debt has to be paid by Americans with rifles in their 
hands, fighting for England and France in our turn. Will we put 
a million men in France? Yes, and five million if it is necessary 
in order to see the fight through and win. 

Let us take care of our foreign foes and take care of our do- 
mestic traitors, too. I do not wish to copy Germany's example in 
most things; but I would treat every German spy in this country 
exactly as Germany would treat an American spy in Germany; 
and I would treat every American traitor as Germany has treated 
German traitors. Let us make treason an unhealthy game to play 
at. Let us remember that when the life of the nation is at stake, 
it is well to follow the example of those arch-apostles of freedom, 
Washington and Lincoln, in the way they dealt with the traitors 
of their time — by martial law. And having dealt with the traitors, 
then deal with the conditions which have produced traitors; deal 



22 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

with the policies of the past which have encouraged men to come 
hither only on the theory that they were changing one feeding trough 
for a better feeding trough. Insist hereafter that any man who 
comes here comes only after having definitely and in good faith 
made up his mind that he is going to be an American and nothing 
else. If he adopts the Lot's wife attitude and looks back to the 
cities of the plain — inasmuch as it is not possible to turn him into 
a pillar of salt — at least let us send him back to the country from 
which he came. And there are some native Americans we might 
with advantage send with him. If I could address a Council of 
Perfection to the Senators present, I would suggest that inasmuch 
as we are at war with Germany, there is no reason why we should 
spare her ; and so I would endeavour to give Senator La Follette to 
her. 

I, like your President, am a man who represents in one way 
at least the Americanism of the future; for in my case, if you 
try to connect me with old-world nationalities by hyphens, you 
would need seven of them. I have a certain ancestral right to come 
to The Pennsylvania Society, for a quarter of my blood is Pennsyl- 
vanian, and it includes two of the founders of Germantown. Par- 
don me for just one word about my ancestors, as having a bearing 
on the present day problem. Two hundred and twenty-five years 
ago there were some German peasants in Germantown, who had 
come here because the armies of Louis XIV ravished the Palatinate. 
There was an Irishman who had left Ireland because Protestants 
didn't make Ireland a pleasant place for Catholics; and there was 
a Frenchman who left France because Catholics didn't make France 
a pleasant place for Protestants. There were some English and 
Welsh Quakers. There were some Scotch farmers. And there 
were some Dutch traders and mechanics here in New York. Those 
people and their descendants gradually grew to speak the same 
language. They intermarried. If they hadn't I wouldn't be here! 
And if my ancestors in the male line had continued to speak Dutch, 
I might have been Sheriff of Nassau County; but I would never 
have been President of the United States. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 23 

The other day I made a little trip through Wisconsin and Min- 
nesota, speaking as I am speaking tonight. I took with me two as 
straight Americans as I know — one a man of German ancestry, one 
a man of Swedish ancestry. One presided and the other introduced 
me. Now, supposing that Mr. Butz had presided in German and 
Judge Nelson had introduced me in Swedish, and I had then burst 
into oratory in Dutch — why, the audience would each have needed 
three interpreters in order to tell what we were at. But we all used 
the same speech. We not only bore loyalty to only one flag, but 
we expressed ourselves in one language. If any immigrant who 
comes here does not learn to speak English in five years, let us send 
him back ; and let us pass a law forbidding the teaching of German 
in public schools for children under the age of fourteen; after that 
let them learn it as they would any other tongue; but let them 
understand that they speak English, that they talk United States, 
if they are to live in the United States. 

And now for heaven's sake, friends, don't let your enthusiasm 
about this matter die with the War. The other crowd won't let it 
die! Look what the German-American Alliance have been doing- 
in this country ! They organize against America. We must organ- 
ize for America. Don't forget that every man who calls himself an 
American and something else is not an American at all. Either 
a man is straight United States and nothing else, or he ought to be 
sent out of the country. 

Apply this to the War. We must be Americans and nothing 
else. We must stand by every ally of the United States. The man 
who is hostile to any ally of the United States is hostile to the 
United States. If we see this War through with our Allies, we have 
a right to ask of them that they fight the war loyally to the end, 
and that which we ask of others we must ourselves do. We came 
into this War very late. Therefore it is trebly incumbent upon us now 
to do our full part in it. Help France. Don't just be content, you 
men here, you men who number in your ranks so many of the lead- 
ing and the most influential men in our country ; don't you be con- 
tent with just coming here, passing a pleasant evening, applauding 
the speeches and then going home and thinking it over. Shoot the 
way you shout. Back up the War. Thank heaven some of you 



24 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

stand by all our Allies and put the war through and make war on 
all our foes. Don't let us stay at war with Germany and at peace 
have backed it up yourselves ; others have backed it up with your 
sons, as the flag shows. See that the country backs it up. Back up 
France; give money; and I cannot speak too strongly in favour of 
the way in which the Congress has appropriated the necessary funds. 
Give the money, give the food, build the ships, and build them with 
three-shift days ; build them by working day and night. Remember 
that any delay of so much as a week that is not vitally necessary, 
represents treason to the Allied cause. Build the guns. We have 
been getting France, hard-pressed France, to build the guns for us ; 
.bend every energy to getting our own people to build the guns for 
us and for the French, too. Build the airplanes. And when you 
have done all that, remember that no mere expenditure of dollars, 
that no mere building of machines, will save this nation's soul unless 
this nation sends its own sons to fight. Uncle Sam must not con- 
fine himself to the role of a sutler. He has got to be a soldier. 
That is the only way by which we can permanently earn our own 
self-respect and therefore the respect of ally or enemy. 

There must be nothing half-hearted in our attitude toward this 
war. I don't believe in ever going to war if you can help it, but 
if you go to war, go to war. I earnestly hope that the day will come 
when every statesman will feel it incumbent upon him to conduct 
the affairs of the State with the same nice attention to honour as 
that by which an honourable man conducts his own affairs. 

I ask that we scrupulously refrain from wronging others, that 
we refuse to be wronged by others, and that we stand up for others 
when they are wronged. Never will we get international fair dealing 
by passing resolutions, or putting down nice, high-sounding phrases 
on pieces of paper. In municipal law, in the internal development 
of any nation, justice comes only when men are willing to fight 
in quarrels in which they have no immediate interest. That is, 
never will you get justice in a nation until men are willing to stand 
up for the rights of others, even when their own rights are not 
immediately concerned. In international affairs, wrong will stop 
only when nations like this nation are willing to fight at the drop 
of the hat when such a wrong is done as was done to Belgium. So 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 25 

with two out of three of Germany's vassal States in alliance with 
her. There are four of the Central Powers. We made war — 
rather, we didn't make war, but one of them made war on us, ten 
months ago ; we admitted it eight months ago. And at last we 
have declared war on Austria. 

Of course, if for the last eight months we have been at peace 
with Austria, then our conduct has been so shamefully unneutral 
that she would by right in any International Court have an enormous 
bill of damages against us; and if we have been at war with her, 
it is a pity she didn't know it. 

It is nearly impossible for any Power to behave worse than 
Germany; but Turkey has achieved the impossible. It is to be 
deeply deplored ; it is a stain on our national honour if we stay one 
day longer at peace with Turkey; and unless we go to war with 
Bulgaria we are acting treacherouly to Servia and Roumania. 

Never hit anyone if you can help it, but never hit soft. No- 
body is grateful for being hit soft. If you hit a man, but if you 
only hit him a little, he will hurt you ! Don't hit him at all, if you 
can help it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep. 

(I am glad to see the rapidity with which you grasp my mean- 
ing.) And only by making this war thoroughgoing, by fighting 
Germany and all her Allies, and fighting them victoriously, can we 
remove the nightmare of the German threat to the civilized world 

I wish that all of you here would read an article by a French 
publicist, Andre Cheradame, in the Atlantic Monthly of this month. 
Read what he says on the need of radical treatment of the Austro- 
Hungarian and Balkan and Asiatic situations. Get your friends 
who have influence with the newspapers of the cities from which 
you come to read it and set the facts before the American people. 
Inasmuch as we are in the war, we don't want to fight just enough 
to make Germany eager to get at us again, and not enough to make 
her afraid of getting at us again. Belgium must be restored and 
indemnified. We need not put any punitive indemnity on Germany ; 
if we just simply impose the indemnity she ought to pay in order 
to restore Belgium to where Belgium once stood, there will be no 
need of a punitive indemnity. France must have back, not only 
the territory that Germany has taken during the last three and a 



26 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

quarter years, but Alsace and Lorraine. If she does not have them 
back, the peace at the end of this war will not be the kind of peace 
we ought to have out of the war. 

And now take Austro-Hungary and Turkey. They are not na- 
tions at all. Each is a tyranny by a minority over a majority. In 
the case of Turkey, it is the tyranny of one dominant race over 
several others; in the case of Austro-Hungary, it is a tyranny of 
two races, which in the aggregate represent the minority of all the 
people, over the majority which is composed of different races. I 
think it is most important that our people should emphasize the 
fact, in dealing with Austro-Hungary, that when we war against 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we are making war on behalf of 
the majority of the people now dwelling in Austro-Hungary. We 
cannot do justice to the majority of the people dwelling in Austro- 
Hungary except by breaking up the Empire. That is the only way 
to destroy the dual tyranny of the Austro-German and the Magyar. 
That is the only way in which we can make democracy safe for 
ourselves, for the subject peoples of Austria's power, and for all 
the world. Neither democracy nor civilization is safe while these 
two states exist in their present form ; and unless we fight for the 
complete independence of the oppressed nationalities within their 
borders, we betray their rights, we betray the cause of democracy 
in the world and we are false to our own interests. Turkey should 
be driven from Europe. If Russia had developed a real and stable 
democracy, I should have been glad to see Constantinople in her 
hands ; but until she realizes that the Bolsheviki stand on a par of 
tyranny with the Romanoffs themselves, until her democracy saves 
itself from the red extremists who have betrayed it to Germany, 
then all we can do, if we are wise, is to make Constantinople a free 
city of the Straits. The Armenians and Syrian Christians and Jews 
and Arabs should be freed ; and the only way we can stand by 
Roumania is to stand against Bulgaria. It is idle to try to stand by 
Roumania or Servia, unless we stand against the Bulgarian who 
has betrayed his fellow Christians in the interest of his old-time 
oppressor, the Turk. 

In Austro-Hungary, I don't want to see either the German or 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 27 

the Magyar oppressed by anybody. I would stand against any op- 
pression of either by anybody; but neither should they oppress 
anybody. As for the Hungarians, I firmly believe that at this mo- 
ment over four-fifths of the Magyars, the peasants, would welcome 
the break-up of the aristocratic tyranny by which they are ex- 
ploited. Try to make the Magyars of Hungary a real democracy. 
Let the Italians of Austria join Italy and the Roumanians of Hun- 
gary join Roumania. Let the Poles of Austria, Germany and Rus- 
sia become a great Polish commonwealth, stretching to the Baltic, 
not a sham Poland, under a Hohenzollern, but a real Polish com- 
monwealth, with Prussian Poland and Austrian Poland included. 
Let the Bohemians, Moravians and Slovaks become a Greater Bo- 
hemia — and this would be the key of the whole situation, for as 
soon as a Greater Bohemia is founded, the German menace to 
civilization vanishes. Let Servia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzogovina and 
the other southern Slav lands of Austria become a Jugo-Slav com- 
monwealth. It is only by insisting on such action that we can make 
democracy safe in those lands and make civilization safe, make 
small liberty-loving nations safe, from the nightmare of German 
conquest. 

Tonight, in Ambassador Jusserand I greet an old and valued 
friend. I greet him in the way in which he prizes most, for I 
greet him as representing the wonderful commonwealth, the mar- 
velous French Republic, which stands forever as both the most 
charming and the most heroic figure among all the great nations 
of mankind. France embodies all of loveliness and all of valour; 
beauty is her hand-maiden and strength her shield-bearer; and the 
shining courage of her daughters has matched the courage of her 
dauntless sons. For three and a half terrible years she has walked 
high of heart through the valley of the shadow. Her body is in 
torture, but her forehead is alight with the beauty of the morning. 
Never in all history has there been such steadfast loyalty in the 
doing of dangerous duty, such devotion to country, such splendour 
of service and of sacrifice. And great shall be her reward, for she 
has saved the soul of the world. 



28 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 



THE OLD AND THE NEW ENTENTE 

Address of the Honourable Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator of the United 
States from Massachusetts 

It is a very great privilege for me to be permitted by you to 
take part in honouring M. Jusserand. He and I have been friends 
and have known each other for many years. He has been to me a 
kind, loyal and affectionate friend, true and sympathetic always, 
whether in the sunshine of happiness or in the darkness of sorrow. 
How admirably he has performed all the duties of his great position 
is known to the world. With the anxiety of an attached friend, I 
have watched him through these last three terrible years. If he 
has ever made a mistake, if he has ever stumbled on his path, sur- 
rounded as it is by perils and broken by pitfalls, I have not observed 
it. Affection has a keener eye than enmity, and I have never seen 
a moment when I even faintly wished that he had selected another 
course from that which he had chosen. Never absent from his 
post, labouring night and day with an almost inconceivable industry, 
always dignified and never forgetful ; whether torn with apprehen- 
sion or elated by victory and by hope, his calmness, his coolness of 
judgment, above all his steady courage, have never wavered. In 
the history of these evil days that is a noble record of great service 
to a great cause. 

We gather to honour him as a diplomat, as a statesman, as a 
scholar, as a great scholar especially in the history and literature of 
the English-speaking people. We welcome and greet him as the 
loyal friend of the United States. Most of all do we honour him 
in that character in which he himself would most desire to be hon- 
oured, as the Ambassador of France. 

His are the high privilege and the precious right to speak to 
us for France, and in the name of the French Republic. It is our 
part to speak to him of France as, like her own Maid of Warriors 
in shining armour, she towers in the forefront of the battle for 
freedom and civilization. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 29 

It is an oft-repeated saying that there is no such thing as senti- 
ment or gratitude in the dealings of nations with each other. Some- 
times, however, popular proverbs enclose a fallacy and, as a dis- 
tinguished Frenchman once remarked, "No generalization is com- 
pletely true, not even this one." We have had proof of this last 
proposition in ample degree since the present war began in the 
feeling shown by the American people to the people of France. 

France and the United States, in the century and a quarter 
which has elapsed since the foundation of our Government, have 
had their differences and their clashing interests. At the close of 
the Eighteenth Century the two countries were on the verge of war. 
In the days of Andrew Jackson there was a disagreeable controversy 
over certain claims. The attitude of the Government of France 
under the Second Empire during our Civil War aroused some bitter 
feelings in the hearts of those who fought the battle for the Union, 
although the sympathy of the French people was with us and only 
the Imperial Government was hostile. But all these memories, if 
they had any life left in them, were swept away in an instant when 
the present war began. Then the American people remembered 
only how much we owed to France for the achievement of our inde- 
pendence. The names of Lafayette and Rochambeau became house- 
hold words, and in countless speeches and in writings of every sort 
the story of the French Alliance which culminated at Yorktown was 
told and told again with a passionate gratitude which expressed 
itself during our days of neutrality in every form of aid and sym- 
pathy which Americans could give to France and to her people. 
Thus it is apparent that after all these are moments when senti- 
ment and gratitude plays a vivid part in the relations of two great 
nations. And yet, heavy as is the debt which we owe to France for 
her support of the people of the American Colonies in their war 
of independence, we owe today a far greater debt to France than 
even that which was incurred one hundred and forty years ago. 
If France enabled us to win our independence, she has now in still 
larger measure helped us to preserve that independence which was 
so hardly won by Washington with the help of our Ally. 

In 1914 the storm broke. I happened to be in London at the mo- 
ment and I saw the great events of those dreadful days from that 
point of vantage. It seemed to me then, it seems to me now more than 



30 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

ever, that when Germany deliberately began a world-wide war, the 
German Government was guilty of the blackest crime against the hu- 
man race which the blood-stained annals of mankind can show. Of 
the organized and scientific barbarism which has followed that crime 
I had then, like the rest of the world, no conception and no antici- 
pation, but the war itself was a crime so awful, that it did not need 
the hideous setting which has since been given to it to emphasize its 
character at the very outset. It was a world-wide war which was 
then begun because Germany aimed at nothing less than the con- 
quest and subjugation of the world. The German plan, backed by 
a preparation and by a readiness which no other nation could equal, 
was to capture Paris and break France in the first six weeks, and 
then turn upon Russia and crush that empire as the French Re- 
public had already been crushed. I shall never forget the awful 
days when Germany, overcoming the splendid resistance of Bel- 
gium, pushed back the French armies and the small but gallant and 
indomitable army of England until they were almost within reach 
of Paris. Then the French and English turned. The armies of 
France fell upon the advancing masses of the Germans and swept 
them back in utter defeat from the lines of the Marne. When that 
great battle closed the Germans were fifty miles from the outskirts 
of Paris, a victory to be marvelled at for all time. The world, 
even in those days, had been coming to a shuddering belief that the 
German armies were invincible, and when they were backed not 
only by complete preparedness but by chemistry and machinery, it 
seemed as if nothing could withstand them. At the battle of the 
Marne it became apparent that without the chemistry and the ma- 
chinery, in the open field, Frenchmen and Englishmen were their 
superiors. I think that at that moment there must have run through 
the memories of many Americans the verses of an American poet 
written more than fifty years before, in the time of our own Civil 
War: 

"O land of heroes ! In our need 

One gift from Heaven we crave , 
To stanch these wounds that vainly bleed — 

The wise to lead the brave ! 
Call back one Captain of thy past 

From glory's marble trance, 
Whose name shall be a bugle-blast 

To rouse us! VIVE LA FRANCE! 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 31 

Pluck Conde's baton from the trench, 

Wake up stout Charles Martel, 
Or find some woman's hand to clench 

The sword of La Pucelle ! 
Give us one hour of old Turenne — - 

One lift of Bayard's lance — 
Nay, call Marengo's chief again 

To lead us! VIVE LA FRANCE I 

The appeal of the poet was not vain then, it is not vain now 
in these days of trial. The hero came. He plucked Conde's baton 
from the trench, he gave us the hour of old Turenne, and he flung 
back the German armies. You have all seen him here among you — 
General Joffre, the Marshal of France. 

It has been the fate of France to save Europe and civilization 
on more than one stricken field. Charles Martel at Tours stayed 
the oncoming tide of Saracen invasion and determined probably 
that Europe should be Christian and not Mohammedan. In the 
very region where this war has raged Aetius defeated the Huns, 
who never recovered from the blow. There again at the Marne, 
France has once more defeated the Huns, the modern Huns, the 
admirers of Attila, who have made the atrocities of their predeces- 
sors, which have been infamous through the centuries, look pale and 
dim, thus demonstrating the superiority in wanton and ferocious 
cruelty of organized over unorganized barbarism. Twice before, 
then, France has saved Europe and civilization. When she fought 
the battle of the Marne she not only saved Europe, but she also 
saved the New World in which we live from German domination. 
The German plan of world-conquest ended at the Marne. If that 
scheme had succeeded, England would have been the second victim 
and we the next. Therefore, I say, the debt we owe to France far 
surpasses the great obligation which we incurred when the armies 
of France joined us in the Revolution. In some measure we are 
trying to pay that debt and I trust that before the war ends we 
shall go far in payment, but even if we could pay it all, the gratitude 
we feel will never be cancelled or fade into forgetfulness. 

To defeat the German plan of world-conquest at the Marne was 
the first step. The second is to put the Central Powers in a posi- 
tion where it shall be impossible for them ever to renew the 
horrors which they let loose upon the world in 1914. For that end 



32 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

we Americans are righting to-day. We have only just begun to 
fight, and France has been fighting steadily through all these 
three long and terrible years. Ministries may change, but the 
French people have fought like one man during all this bitter time. 
With indomitable courage, without complaint, they have held those 
long lines of trenches and are slowly but steadily forcing back 
the invaders. The world has looked on with an admiration which 
cannot find fit expression in words. As I have watched the 
French through all these weary days and months, I have con- 
stantly thought of the story of the two portraits hanging in an 
old French chateau, portraits of two sons of the house who had 
given their lives for their country, and under these portraits it 
was written : "They were very gentle, they cared nothing for their 
lives." That seems to me to have been the spirit of the French. 
All, the soldiers and the whole people, with no outcry and no 
rhetoric, have seemed simply to say, "We care nothing for our lives 
when the country is in danger and we would far rather die than 
submit to Germany." 

Such, as I understand it, is the spirit of France; such should 
be the spirit of all the Allies. Whatever clouds may lower, how- 
ever long the road, we must press on with unflinching courage to 
the end — to the end we seek. There must be no truce and no 
bargaining. To agree to restore the status quo ante helium would 
simply be to give Germany a breathing space in which she may pre- 
pare to renew the war at a later day. Her word is worthless ; treaties 
are to her government but scraps of paper ; there is no hope for 
a final settlement except in physical guarantees won on the field of 
battle. Therefore we must fight on as France has fought, to a 
complete victory, so complete that for many generations to come 
Germany will be unable again to let loose her horrors and her 
barbarities upon an unoffending world. I give you Vive la France t 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 33 



THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT 

Address of the Honourable James W. Gerard 

I know that after-dinner speaking is a very difficult and danger- 
ous sport, but what of before-breakfast speaking? And I shall 
relieve the minds of those Pennsylvanians who have to catch trains 
for Englewood, by telling them that I never speak more than nine 
minutes, because every time I speak after dinner, when I go home 
my wife asks me whether I went by any stations in my speech 
where I might have gotten off. And it is a very hard thing for 
one who is not used to speaking, to come after speakers such as have 
addressed you tonight. I know that I am a sort of volunteer in 
the speaking line, a fact that was very forcibly borne in on me not 
long ago in Los Angeles. After I had addressed a meeting there, 
as I walked down the street I heard two women behind me talking, 
and one of them said, "What do you think of his speech?" and the 
other one said, "Well, he talks just the way we did." They said, 
"What's the use of being four years in Germany and not being 
able to speak any better than that?" But they forgot, as Ambassa- 
dor Jusserand told you, that it was my distinction as a diplomat 
in Germany, to follow the advice of Talleyrand and be silent in 
seven languages ; but any American, diplomat or otherwise, who 
has been in Germany during this war and knows of the hellishness 
that that nation is preparing against the world, has one duty before 
it, and that is, to come out and break silence, if he can, in thirty 
languages. 

When I went back to the hotel in Los Angeles that night, I 
told a friend of mine from New York, who often runs for office, 
what these women had said about me, and he remarked, "Don't mind 
that, I had a similar experience once, myself. I heard two women 
talking about me after I made a speech in New York, and one of 
them said, 'What do you think of his speech ?' to which the other one 
replied, 'Mamie, I don't know, but his trousers bag at the knees just 
like William Jennings Bryan.'" 



34 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

You know it is superfluous, after what our great ex-Presi- 
dent has said to-night, to speak about the aims of the war, and 
especially after the splendid message given only a few weeks ago 
by our great present President who is leading us into war with an 
efficiency never before known in our history, and who by that 
message has stiffened the hearts of every American into breathing 
steel. And it is superfluous to talk about the beginnings of this 
war, when your president, Mr. Beck, has, with the clearest analysis 
and as convincingly as a proposition of Euclid, presented the evi- 
dence in the case, and what great work he is doing — going about 
the country in the last six months as a missionary, bearing the 
flaming cross of patriotism. 

Col. Roosevelt said that I was never close to the Kaiser during 
the war. Well, I remember one occasion when I was close to 
the Kaiser. That was on the twenty-fifth of October, 1915, when 
he stood very close to me, and he put his face about three inches 
from mine and with a manner which is quite Rooseveltian — although 
he did not say, "I am delighted' —he shook his finger in my face 
and said, "I shall stand no nonsense from America after this 
war; America had better look out after this war." That is some- 
thing for you and every one of us to think of, that if they win 
this war, they mean to come here and collect from our skins its 
entire cost. 

And there is one thing, now, about the war that I would 
like to speak of. We have met new weapons in the war that we 
have been compelled and will be compelled to adopt, like poison 
gas, and flame throwers. The Germans are making use of a far 
more insidious weapon than that — the weapon of Propaganda, and 
at this very moment, because we do not challenge them in that field, 
they are propaganding the whole neutral world against us. Take 
the case of Sweden. In Sweden the Court is pro-German, the 
aristocracy pro-German; the officers of the army pro-German, but 
the people, if they only had a chance to be convinced, if we only 
presented our side of the case, would be with us and with the 
Allies. The Germans are taking advantage, in their propaganda, 
of the fact that we have declared a partial blockade — an embargo 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 35 

on food against Sweden, but we must have an opportunity to pre- 
sent to that people the fact that when the mines of Sweden are 
producing iron which goes into Krupp cannon to be used against 
our troops, that we do not propose to send food saved in America 
to nourish the bodies of those who are furnishing artillery to our 
enemies. And there is a propaganda, that we should meet, news- 
paper with newspaper, article with article, in South America, in 
Mexico, in Holland and in all the countries of the world. And 
then, besides that, we have the propaganda to meet here at home. 
The other night I was talking to a School Association here in New 
York and I told them what I found when I was in Chicago during 
my travels this summer — how in the Grammar Schools of 
Chicago there is no language taught but German; how the Board 
of Education of Chicago devised itself a Speller, the first book in 
English put in the hands of a scholar in Chicago, and that book 
contained just one piece of writing, just one reading piece, a fulsome 
eulogy of the German Kaiser. 

And I thought today that I would find out what was going on 
in the schools of New York, so I telephoned up from downtown to 
my secretary and said, "Go and find out, if you can, the books that 
are used by the Board of Education in the study of German in this 
city and collect as many of them as you can." When I went back 
to the hotel tonight she had collected forty-six. I had time to look 
at only six, and of those I brought, I think, four here, and they are 
all of them stuffed with German propaganda. 

If you look over one of these books you will see that the part 
entitled "Stories and Histories" commences with a story of the 
founding of Frankfort by Charlemagne, but it does not mention the 
fact that Frankfort was captured as a free city by the Prussians in 
'66 and made to pay an indemnity of millions of marks. 

The next two articles right in the front are about that old 
bigamist, Charlemagne, with a picture of his coronation. 

The next is an account of what a good man, another Emperor, 
Frederick Barbarosa, was. Then there are two extracts from 
"Faust," but they do not put in the article what Goethe wrote — that 
the Prussian was born a brute and civilization will make him 
ferocious. No mention is made of what Goethe wrote of America, 



36 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

when he said, "America, du hast es besser — America, you are better 
off." The rest of the book is devoted to Frederick the Great, with 
pictures, stating what a fine man he was ; the same Frederick who 
declared that he went to war, a war in which one-tenth of the whole 
population of Germany perished in seven years, simply "because he 
wanted to be talked about" — the Frederick the Great who boasted 
that he had only one cook, but a hundred spies ! 

The next article is an account of the war of liberation, and then 
follow three poems about the Fatherland, Field Marshal Bluecher 
and the Three Grenadiers, which is about Napoleon, and tells how 
the dead Grenadier, when the Emperor gallops over his grave, will 
rise up from the grave to aid him. Then follow two more articles 
about Bismarck and Moltke, and a poem about the horse of Grove- 
lotte, and an account, a long account, of the Germans in the United 
States. In this account the author says that William Penn, whose 
picture is up there, and who helped found your state, was a failure 
as a colonist until he called in the services of the German Pastorious, 
who brought over some of Colonel Roosevelt's ancestors with him. 
The authors say the Germans won the War of the Revolution and 
the Civil War and every other war we were engaged in. They do 
not, however, tell how the men of '48 found a refuge here after 
they fought vainly against the despotism of Prussia and the other 
states in the revolution of forty-eight. They relate how the Germans 
won the Revolution for us, but they do not tell that the Hessians and 
the Anspachers were sold by their rulers in order to fight against us. 
There is nothing of that in this history. The authors then tell of 
how von Steuben organized our revolutionary army for victory, but 
do not tell that von Steuben was hired as a soldier of fortune by a 
Frenchman to come over and organize our armies. The book then 
closes with two poems about the Fatherland. The authors do not 
put in the statements, for instance, about Von Buelow, the ex-Chan- 
cellor of Germany, who stood up once in the Reichstag and said : 
"I experience no embarrassment in saying here publicly that justice 
can never be a determining consideration for Germany." In these 
other books, written by German professors at Vassar, all try to show 
how good and kind these kings and emperors are. In the book of 
Professor Lillian L. Stroebe, Ph.D., Heidelberg, associate professor 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 37 

of German in Vassar College, is given the following anecdote : "A 
man was having his boots blacked on the streets of New York and 
the shoe polisher asked him ten cents, and the gentleman said: 'In 
Washington I never pay more than five.' To which the shoe polisher 
replied : 'Then you had better go to Washington.' " That is a speci- 
men of German wit she picked out. Then she shows how good the 
kings are : "Frederick William IV of Prussia went to visit a school. 
He called out a little girl and showed her an apple and said: 'To 
what kingdom does this belong?' 'To the vegetable kingdom,' she 
replied. Then he showed her a gold piece : 'To what kingdom does 
this belong?' he asked. 'To the mineral kingdom.' Then he pointed 
to himself and asked: 'To what kingdom do I belong?' and the little 
girl replied : 'You belong to the Kingdom of Heaven !' ' : I am sure 
she got wonderfully rewarded — and the teacher moved up at least 
two places in the line. 

Now that is the sort of stuff that the taxpayers of New York 
are having their children brought up on. 

Here is another book which has the Prussian royal arms on 
the outside, containing anecdotes of Frederick the Great and other 
Prussian kings. The author says in his preface that he does not 
narrate the story of the lives of these men, but nevertheless gives 
glimpses of what they were and did and that this may help to show 
why Germans held them in such high esteem. 

In here there are anecdotes about the present Kaiser; one of 
them about his telling a terrible German pun ; another one how 
he gave an alarm clock to an officer who didn't wake up early 
enough, and then one about his earlier youth, which tells how he 
didn't like cold water, but was very fond of being saluted by the 
sentries and how they persuaded him to take a bath by not allowing 
the sentries to salute him until he had. Since that time he seems 
to have developed a fondness for hot water, so much so, that he 
has gotten himself very thoroughly in it! 

We have got to meet this propaganda here at home, and as 
Colonel Roosevelt said, these people who have come here and are 
disloyal (and whom the Colonel compared to an animal who puts 
all four feet in the trough) should be sent back where they came 
from. There is one particular way of tying up that particular 



38 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

animal, and that is to "hog-tie" him, as the farmers call it. We 
should hog-tie every German-American who has abused our hospital- 
ity and send him back to his Kaiser. 

We honour Ambassador Jusserand not alone because he repre- 
sents France, but because of himself, because he is a successful 
Ambassador; and I tell you that there is no more difficult trade 
nowadays than that of being an Ambassador. I saw an editorial in 
the Evening World in which the writer suggested : "What is the 
use of having Ambassadors? Why keep such 'Animiles'? Let 
us transact all our business by cable." Just imagine if during this 
war a cable had come signed "Woodrow" and addressed to 
"William," saying "Treat the prisoners decently." What would 
the answer have been ? Wouldn't he have received the same answer 
to a protest against the murdering of our women and children on 
the high seas? 

If any of you had been in Germany and Berlin in the first days 
of the war and seen the whole of the Wilhelmplatz filled with Ameri- 
cans without passports and without money, all trying to see one of 
these "Animiles," you would perhaps have believed that after all 
there was some use for a diplomatic service. 

Ambassador Jusserand, during the painful period of our neutral- 
ity, has acted with a tact as exquisitely balanced as that of scales 
that weigh to the one-thousandth part of a milligram — he has won 
a high place in our affections and we congratulate him on the honour 
that we know that his own country will pay him. 

Both he and Col. Roosevelt told you of the steeplechase course 
which Col. Roosevelt established in Rock Creek Park in Washing- 
ton. He had a line of obstacles there to climb, places to swim. 
I had the honour once of being taken on one of these walks and 
early in March had to swim the creek there, where Col. Roosevelt 
did not break the ice — and he is the greatest human ice breaker 
that there is — I had to bite my way through with my teeth. And of 
all the steeplechasers on that steeplechase course, there was none 
who climbed and swam and tennissed more successfully than Am- 
bassador Jusserand. We hope that he will surmount all obstacles 
of his career as gracefully as he negotiated those in the Roosevelt 
Steeplechase Park. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 39 

We know that it is going to cost us something to stand by the 
side of France in this war, but before we win, many of the men 
who are represented by the star on that flag will have paid on the 
battle fields of Flanders, perhaps, the greatest sacrifice of all. 

There is one saying made at Verdun, that has gone out all over 
the world, the words of the French, "They shall not pass,'' and 
there is one saying that comes to-day from every corner of America, 
"They shall not win." And France can be sure of one thing, 
and that is that the brutal yoke of Prussian autocracy shall never 
be put upon the civilization and the Christianity of the world. 



40 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 



A MESSAGE FROM THE BRITISH AMBASSADOR 

Address of Brigadier General William A. White, C. M. G. 

I have been asked to read a message from the Ambassador: 

"As friend, colleague, and Ally, I have had the advantage and 
privilege, day by day, of seeing M. Jusserand at work and I can 
bear witness in my own person to his untiring labours, his undaunted 
courage, his sober and penetrating sense, his brilliant gifts as a 
talker and man of letters, his courage in evil days, his caution in 
bright ones ; and above all, his constant and abiding love for this 
country, where he has spent so many years of his most distinguished 
career." 

Those words, I might say, are written by a personal 
friend of M. Jusserand and I should like to add, as a British soldier, 
my tribute to a representative of France. I have been at the front 
on and off for two and a half years and I have lived in the billets 
in France beside the French people, and I have seen the French 
soldier go over the top, and I have also had the privilege of having 
French officers in the mess to which I had the honour to belong; 
and I can tell you that every British soldier in France looks upon 
the soldiers of France not only with affection and admiration, but, 
I might almost say, love. 

And before I close — it is very late — I would like to ask all 
you representatives here of this vast Republic to give a thought to 
the man in the trench to-night. He, you may remember, is giving 
his all for you here. If you will help him, will back him up and 
will put your shoulder to the wheel, he is going to succeed. When 
you go back tonight, give him a thought and just say to yourselves: 
Can I do anything more to help in this business and to help him 
over there? If you do that — we have been holding the line over 
there for the best part of three years — if you do that and put 
your shoulders to the wheel, I can assure you that at a future day 
your men, the French and our men, are going forward and we are 
going to dictate the terms of peace that we want in Germany. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 41 



ADDRESS BY M. STEPHANE LAUZANNE* 

It is a great pleasure for me to address such an audience at 
such a moment. This is an historical moment. May I say that we 
in France, we were awaiting it since thirty-two months. Since 
thirty-two months we were repeating to the world and to you Amer- 
icans, who in the world are our oldest and dearest friends, we were 
repeating that somewhere in Europe there was a Nation in which 
no one could trust ; a Nation for which the most solemn treaties 
were mere scraps of paper ; a Nation which was a danger for the 
whole of humanity ; and we were not the only ones to say that. 
Men in this country, men guided by courage and by conscience, 
repeated it with us, claimed it with us. You know these men. One 
of them is sitting by me, Mr. Wickersham, and another one is not 
there, and I regret it — Mr. Beck. When we said that, when we re- 
peated that, you were listening to us, because you are friends ; but 
very often you smiled and doubted and thought that we were ex- 
aggerating. Then, we said: "That is all right, let us wait and see. 
Truth is stronger than speeches; let us wait; truth will be known 
one day." Gentlemen, those days have come. 

There was, first of all the day of February 3, when you, the most 
liberal and most peaceful Nation of the world, you felt that you 
could no longer sit at the same diplomatic table with a Nation 
without honour and without dignity, and you broke off with Ger- 
many. 

Then there was another day, there was the day of April 2, 
when you did something more. You felt that your duty was not 
only to keep away from brutes and savages, but that it was also 
your duty to defend civilized men against brutality and savagery, 
and you declared war on Germany. 

♦Delivered by M. Stephane Lauzanne at the Annual Meeting of the 
Society at the Bankers Club, April 17, 1917. The Hon. George W. Wicker- 
sham, Past President, presided. M. Lauzanne is Editor-in-Chief of Le 
Matin, of Paris, and a member of the Mission franchise in America. 



42 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

We were awaiting these days since thirty-two months, but we 
knew that they would come ; we knew that they would come be- 
cause we were fighting, struggling, suffering and bleeding for one 
thing for which you, yourselves in your history you had fought and 
struggled, suffered and bled ; not for money, not for domination, 
not for territories, but for something which is much higher and 
much nobler — for an ideal. Our ideal, your ideal, is to restore in 
Europe a spirit of freedom, of justice, and above all of respect 
of international law. That spirit will be restored only when the 
other spirit, the spirit of brutality, of domination and of autocracy 
symbolized by Prussian militarism will have been extirpated from 
Europe. 

That Prussian militarism must go. It will go when those who 
are affected by it will understand that they are not the strongest 
but the weakest ; that they have not to dictate terms of peace, but 
that they have to agree to terms of peace ; when they will under- 
stand that they have not to grant any pardon, but that they have 
to ask pardon on their knees to God and to men for the crime that 
they have committed against humanity in starting such a war ! 
When they will understand that they haven't to offer, as an aim, 
not to annihilate this or that Nation, but that they have to respect 
the independence of every Nation in the world, big or small, strong 
or weak as the supreme law of Europe and of humanity. For this, 
gentlemen, we will fight, and we will fight to the bitter end — what- 
ever may be the sufferings of the nation, whatever may be the hard- 
ness of destiny. In the dark days of the Battle of Verdun, General 
de Castelnau once said: "The whole French race will perish on 
the battlefield, rather than be subject to Germany." Well, this is as 
true today as it was a year ago. This is even more true today 
than it was a year ago ; and the whole French race would perish 
gladly, rather than to live in a degraded humanity — for humanity 
would be degraded if ever Germany would be victorious all over 
the whole world. 

But today there is no question of dying ; today it is most heartily 
that we will continue to fight, and it is most heartily that we will 
continue to fight because we know that some help is going to come 
to us. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 43 

There is a new combatant with us. You have given us your 
hand, the clean hand of a free people ; and we have given you our 
hand, the clean hand of an unsubjected people. 

Gentlemen, I told you about two great days which will remain 
eternally engraved in French hearts ; but there will be a third one. 
There will be the day when American soldiers, with their American 
flag, will pass under our Arch of Triumph in Paris adjacent to 
Champs-Elysees before going to battle. That day, when it comes, 
will be a day of tremendous joy all over France. It will be a day 
of tremendous joy all over France, because we will know that not 
far distant in the future is the day of victory. Understand me, 
gentlemen, not the victory of France, not the victory of England, 
not the victory of Russia or of the Allies, but the victory of right,. 
of justice and liberty and civilization. I thank you. 



44 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 



LUNCHEON for M. HENRY FRANKLIN-BOUILLON 

September 7, 1917* 
ADDRESS OF THE HONOURABLE JAMES M. BECK 

Gentlemen, may I have your attention for a few minutes? 

I think this little luncheon, which has been arranged very hastily 
in honour of our distinguished guest, would be incomplete if we 
did not have a few words from him as a message from France. 

He would come to us well accredited, if he came in no other 
capacity than as a citizen of France. I do not think there is any 
expression, to which the voluminous literature of this war has given 
rise, which is so full of truly eloquent meaning as that phrase, that 
lingers so lovingly in our memories and trips so lightly from our 
tongues, "somewhere in France." It sounds the abyssmal depths 
of human suffering and self-sacrifice, and rises to the supremest 
heights of heroism and nobility of soul. 

M. Franklin-Bouillon, let me say to you that all that Homer 
ever wrote in his immortal Iliad may not more powerfully impress 
unending generations of men to come as that expression "somewhere 
in France." 

Therefore, if our distinguished guest came to us simply as a 
citizen of France, we would bid him thrice, and indeed a thousand- 
fold welcome ; but we welcome him today on his own account, be- 
cause he is here, not only as a very distinguished member of the 
French Chamber of Deputies, the leader of one of the greatest polit- 
ical parties in that country, but he also comes to us on an errand 
of peculiar interest and value. He has come to this country to 

This luncheon was given by President Beck to M. Franklin-Bouillon 
at the Bankers Club, September 7, 1917. The members of the Council 
and a number of other gentlemen were present. M. Franklin-Bouillon 
is Chairman of the Interallied Parliamentary Committee and President 
of the French Radical Party. On his return to France, which imme- 
diately followed President Beck's luncheon, he became a member of 
the short-lived Cabinet of M. Painleve as Ministre charge des Missions 
a l'Etranger. 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 45 

interest our Government, as he has already interested those of Eng- 
land and Russia, in an inter-parliamentary union between the coun- 
tries of the Grand Alliance. 

In the little that I have been able to contribute to the contro- 
versial history of the war, I have endeavoured again and again to 
emphasize the point that if there be one thing that this war has 
taught above all others, it is that a union of all nations is, under 
present conditions of fact, an absolute impossibility, because you 
cannot have honest men and murderers sitting down at the same 
council board in the spirit of good will, without which there can be 
little efficacy in their deliberations ; and therefore I have endeavoured 
to say that the closest approach that we can come to building the 
foundations of a future and better civilization is to have an alliance 
of the democratic nations, or at least, of the nations that have kin- 
dred ideals, and common conceptions of international righteousness. 
This is something that M. Franklin-Bouillon is trying to put into 
a concrete and effective method by the suggestion that the great 
legislative bodies of the democratic nations, to which I have re- 
ferred, shall have some form of union, which shall give at least an 
approach to an organic unity of the democracies of the world. I 
am very confident, if such a thing could come to pass, it would be 
an immeasurable blessing, because the cablegrams that the New 
York Herald has been reproducing in the last two or three days 
between the Kaiser and the Czar, show that it is dangerous that the 
destinies of nations and the peace of peoples should rest in the ex- 
clusive power of executive rulers, whether they be Kaiser, Czar or 
President, or any name which they may be given ; that, in other 
words, the moment the supreme issues of peace or war are put into 
the power of a few individuals, dealing with the destinies of nations 
more or less secret, that moment you have, of necessity, the oppor- 
tunity, the fruitful soil out of which intrigue and ambition and self- 
ish interest may grow ; whereas, if you take the parliamentary bodies 
of these nations, always assuming that those parliamentary bodies 
truly express the will of their respective peoples, then you have, 
not perhaps so efficient as one-man power, but there is a composite 
expression of the popular will of a number of countries, and if they 
are devoted to the traditions, to which the French revolution gave 



46 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

origin of liberty, equality and fraternity, then indeed, such an inter- 
parliamentary union, however crude it may be as an approach to 
a greater world state, yet gives the promise of some effective com- 
bination, not between the rulers of peoples but between the peoples 
themselves. And upon that great, lofty, splendid mission, M. Frank- 
lin-Bouillon has come. 

One further word before I introduce him. We welcome him, 
as I have said, for his own sake, and also because of his name. I 
gave this lunch as President of The Pennsylvania Society not only 
because it was my great privilege to meet M. Franklin-Bouillon in 
London last year and join with him in speaking to English audiences, 
but because he not only bears but takes peculiar pride and pleasure 
in the name of Franklin, the first President of the Commonwealth 
of Pennsylvania, and that brings up a name to conjure with, either 
in France or in America. 

Let us recall what the relations between France and the English 
colonies were before the Revolution. It is little to say that on the 
part of the colonists there was the traditional feeling of the Eng- 
lish squire against France, a feeling that was as old as centuries 
of continuous strife. On the part of France its people only looked 
at the English colonists as an alien and hostile people who had 
wrested their western empire from them on the plains of Abraham. 
The man who was chiefly instrumental in bringing together France 
and the American colonists into a concert of aggressive action was 
Benjamin Franklin. After Franklin came to Paris France began 
to know America better, began to love America as she had never 
loved America before. Franklin was for a time the great central 
figure of the Court of Versailles in those stormy days that preceded 
the revolution, and when he walked down the Gallery of Mirrors 
and paid his respects to Louis the Sixteenth, he was the "observed of 
all observers." He was hailed and greeted as the incarnation of the 
democratic spirit, then about to assert itself, and upon the other 
hand, when this extraordinary man — I think the greatest man of 
the eighteenth century, in some respects the greatest man intellec- 
tually of all times — when Benjamin Franklin, after those eight most 
fruitful years in France came back to America it was then that 
America began to love France not only because of the distinguished 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 47 

honour that had been shown by France to their representative, 
Franklin, but on account of the potent aid that it had given to us 
in our hour of supreme need. 

And so, M. Franklin-Bouillon, we welcome you here because 
you bear a name that we honour greatly, and we want you to carry 
back to France this message from representative business men of 
New York: that while there may be no vociferous enthusiasm in 
America as to this war, because we entered it slowly, and of neces- 
sity the capacity for indignation was somewhat dulled; but there is 
a spirit among us that may be better than enthusiasm, a quiet, 
steady determination, east and west of the Mississippi, in all classes 
and among all races, to see this war through to a conclusive vin- 
dication of the basic principles of civilization. We will see it 
through because we love France, and will not see France perish. 

We sympathize with you in your infinite suffering; we envy 
you in your hour of supreme glory. When I am at a loss to say 
anything, which is only too frequently, I always turn to the master 
of all speech, the greatest poet that ever lived, and I want to quote 
these lines which seem to me not merely to describe the Kaiser 
and all that the Kaiser represents, but to describe, the spirit, M. 
Franklin-Bouillon, in which America joins hands with France today 
in the resolute purpose of seeing the war through. See how apt 
these lines are from King Richard the Third: 

"The wretched, bloody and usurping boar, 

That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines, 
Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough 
In your embowelled bosoms, this foul swine 
Lies now even in the centre of this isle, 

In God's name, cheerily on, courageous friends, 
To reap the harvest of perpetual peace 
By this one bloody trial of sharp war." 

There Shakespeare says, "cheerily on, courageous friends" ; 
and it is in that spirit that America greets you as the representa- 
tive of France today, and it is in that spirit that it is my honour and 
privilege to introduce you to these citizens of New York. 



48 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 



ADDRESS OF M. HENRY FRANKLIN-BOUILLON 

I have never felt more deeply what is the value of a true friend- 
ship between men than I do at this minute, after having listened to 
the words of my friend Mr. Beck. I know you are very busy men, 
but I will detain you only a very few minutes, and I simply wish to 
state how much I appreciate the privilege which he has given me 
of meeting you today in one of the few minutes of leisure that you 
have. 

I will simply tell you first on what mission I came over here. 
After eighteen months of this war, we felt in France that probably 
the largest part of the mistakes we had made resulted from the 
want of true cooperation between the Allies, and we felt that how- 
ever heroic might be our soldiers, however far-seeing might be our 
statesmen, it was absolutely no use to try to carry out a war as be- 
tween an alliance and one centralized power, if we were not able to 
bring about the perfect unity which we otherwise would manage to 
get. And therefore, the French Parliament — of which I have nothing 
to say save that I hope that later on it will be proved by facts that it 
has done as much to save our country as our army has done, and 
that is the one privilege we claim, and we know, sir, that history 
will vindicate us in that claim — entrusted me with this mission of 
going over to London and trying to explain to our English friends 
how much we had suffered from want of knowledge of one another, 
how much it was necessary for us to do away with these diffi- 
culties by bringing together the two peoples, or rather, the repre- 
sentatives of the two peoples, that is, the elected members of their 
Parliaments. 

Before I go further, will you allow me, in a few seconds, to 
call your attention to this fact — some thoughts which I believe those 
who are studying these problems, and other men have in their mind. 
Those who have not studied these problems may, perhaps, not have 
distinguished this fact. It is one of the main facts. We are here ; 
we are an alliance between peoples who knew little of one another 



WAR ADDRESSES : 1917 49 

before they began to fight together against their enemy. Look at 
the facts : With England we fought for centuries and we misunder- 
stood each other for centuries. There was no alliance between our 
country and England — there was no possibility of that alliance — 
and suddenly, in a few seconds, between July 31 and August 4 we 
had to call for the full support of England. Whatever may have 
been the differences between your country and England — and I may 
say that we had more than you ever had — we must say today, 
simply as men who know what is the value of words, that when 
we called for the support of England, England gave us more than 
we ever could hope or ever asked for. 

But still here we are, the oldest foes of England, in a battle 
in which we are to save the life of our nation. With Italy we have 
been determined enemies for twenty-five years — with Russia, allies ; 
but I may say it is our fault. We knew nothing of this ally with 
whom we had been bound in formal alliance for more than thirty 
years save that at times a powerful international request invited 
us to subscribe to loans, and we did it, and I hope no man here will 
reproach anybody for subscribing to these Russian loans. 

That was all that we knew of our allies, and I may say that in 
the whole history of the world, there is not another instance of such 
a paradox, that the greatest of all alliances has been concluded in 
form, been wrought in the bloodiest of wars, among people who 
knew little of one another. The only conclusion you must deduce 
from this statement is that it is the finest test and the best proof 
of the value of the alliance for which we are fighting, that in a brief 
interval, although we knew little of one another, we were so soldered 
with one another that nothing has ever been able to dissolve or 
break up this alliance, and nothing will ever break it. 

And that being the case, this is the fact: we knew nothing of 
one another, and here we were going into a war which we knew 
was going to be a long war, a war not of governments, but of na- 
tions, in which we were pledged for the support of every man, 
every woman, every child, everything — money, blood, every possible 
thing, even the stones and the steel, and even, I may say, the very 
air. They have found the means of poisoning even the atmosphere 
in which we fight. We were pledged to call for every one of the 



50 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

energies of these different allies, knowing nothing of one another, 
having misunderstood each other for centuries, and having fought 
against one another. 

What was the result? During the first month it was prac- 
tically easy, the sense of common duty impelled us to do what we 
were to do ; but the higher the sacrifices we were to ask of every 
nation, the more we were running the risk of some becoming tired. 
After all, you belong to a democracy, like myself, where you are 
going to ask the people to lay down their lives for a cause, where 
they may ask you why, and they are entitled to know what they are 
fighting for, since they know they may die tomorrow in the cause for 
which they are fighting. I can see, and you can see, I believe, what 
is the logical trend of mind of the men of my nation. I can say that 
since we were face to face with this problem of making effective a 
new alliance, and the necessity of getting the people interested in 
the war which their governments were fighting, the only thing we 
can do is to go to the people and explain the situation and tell them, 
"we have made a mistake ; we must repair it, we must do what we 
should have done before" ; and to combine the strength of the 
alliance into an efficient unit is the object for which I have come to 
ask the support of the United States. 

What have we done since we began ? I went over to England ; 
I was fortunate enough to convince Mr. Asquith and the members 
of Parliament, and those members agreed upon the plan which we 
have to follow. I was sent over to Italy. The Russians came over 
to France. Then we formed the Interallied Parliament, as we call 
it now, between the four nations which were really the basis of our 
alliance. I will not go into details ; it is not the time for that ; I 
will simply tell you what are the lines upon which this movement 
has been carried out. 

First of all, Mr. Chairman, the things that must work in times 
of war must be simple ; they must be clear so the people understand 
the purpose. They must be simple, because we have no time for 
details, and it is a very great task to have a movement carried out 
on many lines. 

In every one of these countries we ask the Parliament to 
appoint a committee of twenty-five members — eight from the Senate 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 51 

and seventeen from the Chamber of Representatives. These mem- 
bers form the body of the national section of the Interallied Parlia- 
ment. There were two conditions only. We insisted that every one 
of the parties should be given a proportion of the representation, 
and therefore we had a true representation of the Parliament, and 
the nation. The second condition we insisted on was that they 
should meet regularly, meeting every three months in one of the 
capitals of the Entente, according to the political necessities of the 
hour; and the third condition, which may surprise you at first, in 
people accustomed to speak, we insisted upon the secrecy of our 
deliberations. We wanted two things : the maximum of information, 
and possibilities for action, and we knew that the best thing to ob- 
tain in gaining these two ends was to act as gentlemen with gentle- 
men, to discuss between ourselves what we had to discuss, to be 
prepared to say all that was necessary, but at the same time we 
understood that there were certain things which could not be pub- 
lished — that the best method was to keep the deliberations confi- 
dential. Gentlemen, as we were responsible men, elected by our 
Parliaments, with a mandate and full responsibility, we under- 
stood that if we were going to meet together, we would, little by 
little, learn to know each other. We learned to appreciate each 
other's motives, and we have at once the feeling of respect and of 
mutual confidence, which is necessary for the working of such a 
body. 

Those are the principles ; you see how very simple they are. We 
have adopted them in the different countries, and since that time 
we have met four times, England and France in Paris and then in 
London, France and Italy in Rome, and then in Paris, and last in 
Paris, when the three Parliaments worked together for five days. 

Before I finish with these very few details of the scheme, I 
want you to get the lines on which it has been conducted. In France 
we chose the President of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the 
Chamber, M. Clemenceau ; in England, Lord Bryce, whom you al 1 
know; in Italy, Signor Luzzatti, the former Prime Minister; and in 
Russia, our friend M. Miliukoff, who, unfortunately, has been unable 
to join in our session, because you know the Russian Revolution has 
forced all these men to remain in their country. 



52 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

I believe, sir, in those few words, I have summed up the whole 
of my movement. One point — and I have often omitted it — the only 
difficultly in a movement of this nature is that national govern- 
ments naturally feel very chary of delegating some of their powers 
to constituted bodies, even to a Parliament. Our difficulty was 
to impress the government with this idea, that far from any such 
organization being dangerous to their work, they ought to under- 
stand that we were their best helpers. 

I had this work to do, and I suppose they considered that 
because I knew these different languages, I might be of some use. 
I had, in succession, to convince Mr. Asquith, then Signor Salandra, 
then my own Prime Minister, Briand. Mr. Asquith told me, "It 
is impossible ; you propose to take all power out of their hands ; 
we cannot delegate these powers." I told him that perhaps he had 
better reconsider his decision, and that after all, when men of a 
certain type have decided to do something, it is wiser not to stop 
them, because the thing would be done, and then he would not have 
the benefit of having helped them; and thus all temporary objec- 
tions by some form of persuasion gave way. 

Now, our only pride is to think that in every one of these 
meetings, we have brought the Prime Minister of the country in 
which we met, to preside at the luncheon at which these members 
meet ; and if my friend Mr. Beck is kind enough to allow me to send 
you a small pamphlet, a resume of the work we have done up to 
now, you will see that in every one of these cases the Prime Min- 
ister of the country, whether it be Mr. Asquith, Mr. Briand. or both, 
felt some regret at his temporary opposition, and felt it his duty to 
stand up and to say publicly that nothing in the world had helped 
them so much to carry out the work as the movement we have 
originated. 

Gentlemen, that is for the past. We came over to Washing- 
ton ; I have seen your President ; I was the bearer of a letter from 
the President of the Republic to explain to him the mission. I 
have seen your members of the House and of the Senate. Now, 
the thing is in their hands, and I can say no more than to express 
a hope that they will join in this movement. In any case, you 
understand this movement will not be stopped and the man who is 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 53 

now speaking to you — I hope you will excuse me for being per- 
sonal — has refused for two years in succession to enter the Gov- 
ernment of his country in order to devote his life to this work. 
Because I have seen so many of the mistakes I know were made 
because we knew nothing of our Allies, that I thought, since it was 
in my power, I should devote my life to this work ; and I hav^ done 
it. That is my simple share in this work. I hope I have employed 
my energies to the best results, and for the best purposes in the 
common cause which now unites us. 

And now I am with your Congress. I hope that they will de- 
cide to come with us. Even if they think it is impossible, at all 
events we, as Allies, have done what was our duty : we have come 
to you, and the first moment it was possible for me, I did it. We 
have come to you and invited you to join in a movement which I 
know is the only one which can effect real cooperation between the 
Allies. 

I would only press upon you this further point, which, I may 
say, is practically the one which I have always kept in mind since 
the beginning of these events. We are in a war; it is quite 
enough for me to know what is your race, sir ; to know that when- 
ever America has given its word and begun a work, America never 
desists, and America will be there to the end — I know that. But 
I think that we, who have been in this war from the first days, 
have a duty to you. First of all, without even attempting to offer 
anything in the way of advice, or anything which is not absolutely 
in the spirit of cooperation that is between brothers, we have a duty 
towards you. We have suffered from want of experience; we had 
to learn everything in this war from experience. We have, as Mr. 
Lloyd George so truly said, "Alas, we have blundered from blunder 
into blunder until we came to something better," and we have not 
yet attained our ends. We, who have been in this war even before 
England — have, as our first duty to you to come over to you and 
to try to save you from the experiences which we suffered. That 
is our first duty, and we intend to carry it out. Whatever we may 
tell you, I beg you to take it in this spirit of men who have seen 
their country go through terrible hours, and are going to try to 
spare you what they have learned, alas, at such heavy cost. 



54 THE PENNSYLVANIA SOCIETY 

This is, I believe, the only thing upon which I would like to 
talk to you today — remember this, we might even now have hours 
to go through and difficult times to pass. That is nothing when 
you keep in front of your eyes the ideal for which you are fight- 
ing; everything then is easy, and then it is a question that we have 
a choice simply between life and death. I mean that the fate which 
has been prepared for us is worse than death ; we are face to face 
and have to choose between these two things, and everything is easy. 

But there is one thing which we must keep in mind, and that 
is this problem is such a huge one that there is not a single man 
in the world whose efforts are capable of mastering it. If Napoleon 
came back now, he would be a small personality in the presence of 
the problems which we have to fight and to solve. This thing is 
such a big thing that no man, however strong, however intelligent, 
in any country, mind you — no man can do that alone. 

Therefore, what are we to do? What you have done here, in 
your business world. You are to concentrate your energies, you 
are to build up and you are to remedy this impossibility by not 
leaving things in the hands of any one man, but by building up 
an organization in which everything will be turned to the needed 
purposes. 

Therefore, let us start in this war with this idea: we are to 
mobilize, not only the armies — much more, we are to mobilize the 
nation. But everything, as I said in the beginning, the stones, the 
steel, the men, the women, the children, every particle of energy, 
every atom of intelligence, we must draw to us and try to turn it to 
the use which is needed in this cause ; and therefore, when you find 
men, when you go to those who represent this country, if they be 
in industry, in commerce, or in politics, we must only have one 
idea, to try to enlist them in the movement, to try to draft them — 
that is the military term — to draft them for the war which we are 
waging now. 

We have only one thing to do, which is to consider that we 
have not the right for one moment to leave aside a single one of 
the men who now are necessary to carry out the work to its vic- 
torious end. We are doing it for the men in the army. We have 



WAR ADDRESSES: 1917 55 

done it in our countries for the women and for the children. You 
will have to do it in every sphere of activity of your life. 

It has been my privilege and my pride that at this minute 
and this hour I have been allowed to come over to the public men 
of your country and to explain to them what was really the pur- 
pose for which we entered this war. I hope that later, when all 
things are going to be oragnized a little better than they are now, 
you will see what has really been the idea, the inspiration, I may 
say, of our country in our dealings with the Allies. We have un- 
fortunately lived so long apart that I understand there are many 
things which we have to explain. I have come over here and I 
am going to try to do my best for the time I will remain; but, at 
all events, I wish you to understand that if there could be something 
which is the reward of a man, who, like myself has been entrusted 
with some mandate like this in these difficult times, that the privi- 
lege of addressing you gentlemen and telling you in very plain terms 
what are the aims of the French, with whom you are fighting, is a 
sufficient reward. 

There is one thing for which I can find no words ; it is to ex- 
press to you the sympathy of the people on the other side of the 
water for your nation. At the times we may have been saddened 
at the thought that we were not together and that probably because 
we did not explain well enough, all that was not settled in the first 
days of the war; but there is one thing which remains, and one 
thing which will remain forever: we know what you think of our 
country ; we know what is the feeling of fraternity which unites us. 
It will have been one of the few things to be gained by this war. 
that we will have been able to know our friends. 

Sir, I will say no more. We have learned to respect and to 
love you so much that nothing, and no words, will ever express it 
in the mouth of any Frenchman. 



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